Reassessing the European Union in the United Nations General Assembly

ABSTRACT

In this article, we compare the European Union's (EU's) voting cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to other regional organizations like the African Union, the Arab League, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Caribbean Community, the Economic Community of West African States and the Mercado Común del Sur by using a novel index of voting cohesion. The analysis confirms previous findings that the EU member states vote, at first glance, surprisingly incoherent. However, we are able to show that the EU is the only regional organization that can increase its level of voting cohesion in contested votes. We argue that this is a better indicator for the EU's successful vote co-ordination in the UNGA than the average level of voting cohesion, which is commonly used in studies on voting behaviour.

KEY WORDS:

• Common Foreign and Security Policy
• European Union
• regional organizations
• United Nations General Assembly
• vote co-ordination
• voting cohesion

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the participants of the early-stage researchers' panel at the annual convention of the comparative politics section of the German Political Science Association (DVPW) which took place 9–11 October 2013 in Leipzig, Dr. Christian Stecker and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 Rasch, as well as Jin and Hosli, offer some possible explanations, but do not systematically test them in their research.

2 In contrast, Panke (2013b) displays that the EU has the highest voting cohesion of all ROs. However, the definition of voting cohesion by Panke includes also absences of states. We discuss the potential problems of including absences in more detail below.

3 We included all resolutions between 1970 and 2009.

4 Only cases with at least three vote-casting member states were computed. Voting cohesion is measured using the refined version of the Index of Voting Cohesion.

5 We focus on indices which are designed to measure voting cohesion in parliaments with three voting options (‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘abstention’). In parliaments where only ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes can be cast, the Rice Index (Rice 1928) is probably the most widely used index to measure voting cohesion.

6 We use a ‘fractional logit’ model, since our dependent variable is a proportion and therefore truncated at 0 and 1 (Papke and Woolridge 1996).

7 However, the coding was not always accurate, since some resolutions were coded to more than one of the mentioned categories. We have recoded these cases manually.

Additional information

Biographical notes

Nicolas Burmester and Michael Jankowski both work at the University of Hamburg at the Chair for International Relations.